SAOIRSE RONAN AT HER CANDID BEST
The Oscarnominated actor (for Lady Bird) isn’t bothered about winning or not; says it’s ‘quite nice losing because you can enjoy the night’
Saoirse Ronan is not like other Hollywood stars. Spread out on a sofa in a luxury Paris hotel, she is joking about her bad skin. The sideburns of acne she has in Lady Bird — the acclaimed, coming-ofage movie that has won her a third Oscar nomination at the age of 23 — were very much “real”, she laughed.
“I had bad skin at the time so we just didn’t cover it up. Weirdly I never got bad skin as a teenager at all. It was when I was 21 or 22 when I was doing loads of press that I got it,” says the Irish actor.
Ronan — who was first nominated for an Academy Award when she was just 13, for Atonement (2007), and won a Best Actress Golden Globe last month for Lady Bird — is often talked about as one of the most talented actors of her generation. She is also one of the most down-to-earth, seemingly unphased by having grown up in front of the camera as a child actor from the age of eight. “Going through puberty on screen can be terrifying. You are so aware of what you look like, and to have a lens pointed at your face... So you have to have the attitude that it is more important to get what you are doing right than worry whether you look pretty,” she says.
Doing good work has been Ronan’s watchword since she was very young, carefully choosing quality films rather than playing the fame game. “I was offered an action film at the same time as Atonement (when she was 12) but I knew even then that was not the direction I wanted to go in.” She was a more obvious choice to play an Irish immigrant in Brooklyn, and Ronan insisted that hooking up with indie star Greta Gerwig for her directorial debut on Lady Bird was also a no-brainer. “With Greta I knew it would be smart, interesting and funny,” says Ronan, who, in Lady Bird, plays a teenager in the last year of high school whose lofty ambitions are often at odds with reality and her family’s uncertain finances.
Gerwig, who made her name both writing and starring in Frances Ha (2012) and Mistress America (2015) with director Noah Baumbach, said it was a marriage made in heaven.
Even though the film is semi-autobiographical, Gerwig said she didn’t really “understand the character until (Ronan) started saying the lines... she is this flawed but amazing heroine.”
And for her part, Ronan said she cried when Gerwig was nominated for an Oscar. It was only the fifth time that a woman had been nominated for best director.
“She deserves it so much. It was a really momentous thing for the times we are in... That means a lot to all of us,” said Ronan.
Is she hopeful of finally lifting an Oscar on March 5 (at the third attempt) for the film? Ronan says she hasn’t thought about winning. When you win you have to do all the press afterwards, and you don’t get a chance to have a dance. So it is also quite nice losing because you can enjoy the night.”
AFP